Bob Stewart

Professor Bob Stewart has been teaching and researching the field of sport management and sport policy for fifteen years. He came to the sports studies field with a strong interest in the commercial and sociological development of Australian-rules football, and since then has criticaly reviewed its progress. He co-authored A National Game: The History of Australian Rules Football, published by Penguin Viking in 2008, edited The Games are Not the Same: The Political Economy of Football in Australia, published by Melbourne University Publishing in 2007, and co-wrote More than a Game, published by Melbourne University Publishing in 1998. Bob has also co-authored textbooks on sport management and sport policy under the publishing banners of Routledge from 2005 to 2015, and Allen & Unwin in 1999. Bob has just written a book on drugs and sport under the title of Rethinking drug use in sport: why the war will never be won. It is published by Routledge.
Over the following 12 months Bob will be focussing his attention on (1) the problem of regulating substance use in sport, (2) the costs of sport participation, and its implications for household spending on active recreation.

Areas of expertise
Bob’s areas of expertise are neoliberalism & hyper-modernism, and how they shape the practice and regulation of contemporary sport.

Portfolio responsibilities
Bob is currently driving two research projects.
The first project is focussing on supplement and drug use in community sport. It examines the ways which players and athletes manage their sporting practices as they make their way up the sporting pyramid. Special attention is being given to the idea of self-regulation, the conditions under which it grows, and how it shapes the response of players and athletes to the pressures to use substances to improve their sporting performance. The results of the study will be used to recommend on policy options for the re-regulation supplement-use and drug-use in community sport.
The second project is focussing on barriers to sport-participation, and in particular the influence of costs and prices on levels of participation for different socio-economic cohorts. The project has two parts. Part 1 involves mapping the costs of participation for a representative sample of sports that include high versus low cost, exclusive versus egalitarian, individual versus team, contact versus non-contact, field versus aquatic, and so on. Part 2 involves using a mixed-method model to establish price sensitivities for different sports, and then use the findings to advise government on policy options for increasing participation through the price mechanism and other market interventions.
Bob also has a special interest in cartel structures, social control, and player regulation in elite-sports, and the ways in which neoliberal ideologies shape management practices in sport.